The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution

by Karl Marx

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 170

Translated by the Marx-Engels Institute

Transcribed for the Internet by director@marx.org,
1994

Cologne, December 15. The theory of agreement, which the bourgeoisie,
on attaining power in the person of the Camphausen cabinet, immediately
publicized as the "broadest" basis of the Prussian contrat social, was
by no means an empty theory; on the contrary, it grew on the tree of "golden"
life.

The sovereign by the grace of God was by no means vanquished by
the sovereignty of the people as a result of the March revolution. The
Crown, the absolute state, was merely compelled to come to an agreement
with the bourgeoisie, its old rival.

The Crown offers the aristocracy as a sacrifice to the bourgeoisie,
the bourgeoisie offers the people as a sacrifice to the Crown. Under these
circumstances the monarchy becomes bourgeois and the bourgeoisie monarchical.

Only these two powers exist since the March revolution. They use
each other as a sort of lightning-conductor against the revolution. Always,
of course, on the "broadest democratic basis".

Herein lay the secret of the theory of agreement.

The oil and wool merchants [129] who formed the first cabinet
after the March revolution took pleasure in protecting the exposed Crown
with their plebeian wings. They were highly delighted at having gained
access to the Court and reluctantly driven by pure magnanimity to abandon
their austere Roman pose, i.e., the Roman pose of the United Provincial
Diet, to use the corpse of their former popularity to fill the chasm that
threatened to engulf the throne. Camphausen plumed himself on being the
midwife of the constitutional throne. The worthy man was evidently deeply
moved by his own action, his own magnanimity. The Crown and its followers
reluctantly suffered this humiliating protection and made bonne mine d
mauvais jeu, hoping for better days to come.

The bourgeois gentilhomme was easily taken in by a few honeyed
words and curtsies from the partly disintegrated army, the bureaucracy
that trembled for its positions and salaries, and the humiliated feudals,
whose leader was engaged in a constitutional educational journey.

The Prussian bourgeoisie was nominally in control and did not
for a moment doubt that the powers of the old state had placed themselves
unreservedly at its disposal and had become offshoots of its own omnipotence.

Not only in the cabinet but throughout the monarchy the bourgeoisie
was intoxicated with this delusion.

Did not the army, the bureaucracy and even the feudal lords act
as willing and obedient accomplices in the only heroic deeds the Prussian
bourgeoisie performed after the March revolution, namely, the often sanguinary
machinations of the Civil Guard against the unarmed proletariat? Did not
the subdued district governors and penitent major-generals listen with
admiration to the stern patriarchal admonitions which the local councilors
addressed to the people-the only efforts, the only heroic deeds of which
these local councilors, the local representatives of the bourgeoisie (whose
obtrusive servile vulgarity the Windischgratzes, Jellachiches and Weldens
afterwards repaid with kicks), were capable after the March revolution?
Could the Prussian bourgeoisie have doubted after this that the former
ill-will of the army, bureaucracy and feudal aristocracy had been transformed
into respectful loyalty to the bourgeoisie, the magnanimous victor who
had put a curb both upon itself and upon anarchy?

Clearly the Prussian bourgeoisie now had only one duty -- to settle
itself comfortably in power, get rid of the troublesome anarchists, restore
"law and older" and retrieve the profit lost during the storms of March.
It was now merely a question of reducing to a minimum the costs of its
rule and of the March revolution which had brought it about. The weapons
which, in its struggle against the feudal society and the Crown, the Prussian
bourgeoisie had been compelled to demand in the name of the people, such
as the right of association and freedom of the press, were they not bound
to be broken in the hands of a deluded people who no longer needed to use
them to fight for the bourgeoisie and who revealed an alarming inclination
to use them against the bourgeoisie?

The bourgeoisie was convinced that evidently only one obstacle
stood in the way of its agreement with the Crown, in the way of a deal
with the old state, which was resigned to its fate, and that obstacle was
the people -- puer robustus sed malitiosus, [13O] as Hobbes says. The people
and the revolution!

The revolution was the legal title of the people; the vehement
claims of the people were based on the revolution. The revolution was the
bill drawn by the people on the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie came to power
through the revolution. The day it came to power was also the day this
bill became due. The bourgeoisie had to protest the bill.

Revolution in the mouth of the people meant: you, the bourgeois,
are the Comite du salut public, the Committee of Public Safety, to whom
we have entrusted the government in order that you should defend our interests,
the interests of the people, in face of the Crown, but not in order that
you should come to an agreement with the Crown regarding your own interests.

Revolution was the people's protest against an arrangement between
the bourgeoisie and the Crown. The bourgeoisie that was making arrangements
with the Crown had therefore to protest against the revolution.

And that was done under the great Camphausen. The March revolution
was not recognized. The National Representatives at Berlin set themselves
up as representatives of the Prussian bourgeoisie, as the Assembly of conciliators,
by rejecting the motion recognizing the March revolution.

The Assembly sought to undo what had been done. It vociferously
declared to the Prussian people that the people did not come to an agreement
with the bourgeoisie in order to make a revolution against the Crown, but
that the purpose of the revolution was to achieve an agreement between
the Crown and the bourgeoisie against the people! Thus was the legal title
of the revolutionary people annulled and a legal basis secured for the
conservative bourgeoisie.

The legal basis!

Bruggemann, and through him the Kolnische Zeitung, have prated,
fabled and moaned so much about the "legal basis", have so often lost and
recovered, punctured and mended that "legal basis", tossed it from Berlin
to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt to Berlin, narrowed and widened it, turned
the simple basis into an inlaid floor and the inlaid floor into a false
bottom (which, as we know, is the principal device of performing conjurers),
and the false bottom into a bottomless trapdoor, so that in the end the
legal basis has turned for our readers into the basis of the Kolnische
Zeitung; thus, they could confuse the shibboleth of the Prussian bourgeoisie
with the private shibboleth of Herr Joseph Dumont, a necessary invention
of the Prussian world history with the arbitrary hobby-horse of the Kolnische
Zeitung, and regard the legal basis simply as the basis on which the Kolnische
Zeitung arises.

The legal basis, namely, the Prussian legal basis!

The legal basis on which Camphausen, the knight of the great debate,
the resurrected phantom of the United Provincial Diet and the Assembly
of conciliators, moved after the March revolution -- is it the constitutional
law of 1815 [131] or the law of 1820 regarding the Provincial Diet, [132]
or the edict of 1847, [133] or the electoral and agreement law of April
8, 1848. [134]

It is none of these.

"Legal basis" simply meant that the revolution failed to gain
firm ground and the old society did not lose its ground; that the March
revolution was an "occurrence" that acted merely as a "stimulus" towards
an "agreement" between the throne and the bourgeoisie, preparations for
which had long been made within the old Prussian state, and the need for
which the Crown itself had expressed in its royal decrees, but had not,
prior to March, considered as "urgent". In short, the "legal basis" meant
that after the March revolution the bourgeoisie wanted to negotiate with
the Crown on the same footing as before the March events, as though no
revolution had taken place and the United Provincial Diet had achieved
its goal without a revolution. The "legal basis" meant that the revolution,
the legal title of the people, was to be ignored in the contrat social
between the government and the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie deduced its
claims from the old Prussian legislation, in order that the people should
not deduce any claims from the new Prussian revolution.

Naturally, the ideological cretins of the bourgeoisie, its journalists,
and such like, had to pass off this palliative of the bourgeois interests
as the real interests of the bourgeoisie, and persuade themselves and others
to believe this. The phrase about the legal basis acquired real substance
in the mind of a Bruggemann.

The Camphausen government fulfilled its task, the task of being
an intermediate link and a transitional stage. It was the intermediate
link between the bourgeoisie, which had risen on the shoulders of the people
and the bourgeoisie which no longer required the shoulders of the people;
between the bourgeoisie which apparently represented the people in face
of the Crown and the bourgeoisie which really represented the Crown in
face of the people; between the bourgeoisie emerging from the revolution
and the bourgeoisie which had emerged as the core of the revolution.

In keeping with its role, the Camphausen government coyly and
bashfully confined itself to passive resistance against the revolution.

Although it rejected the revolution in theory, in practice it
resisted only its encroachments and tolerated only the re-establishment
of the old political authorities.

The bourgeoisie in the meantime believed that it had reached the
point where passive resistance had to turn into open attack. The Camphausen
cabinet resigned not because it had committed some blunder or other, but
simply because it was the first cabinet following the March revolution,
because it was the cabinet of the March revolution and by virtue of its
origin it had to conceal that it represented the bourgeoisie under the
guise of a dictatorship of the people. Its dubious beginnings and its ambiguous
character still imposed on it certain conventions, restraints and considerations
with regard to the sovereign people which were irksome to the bourgeoisie,
and which a second cabinet originating directly from the Assembly of conciliators
would no longer have to reckon with.

Its resignation therefore puzzled the arm-chair politicians. It
was followed by the Hansemann government, the government of action, as
the bourgeoisie intended to proceed from the period when it passively betrayed
the people to the Crown to the period of active subjugation of the people
to its own rule in agreement with the Crown. The government of action was
the second government after the March revolution; that was its whole secret.